asked Her Majesty's Government:

What factors caused the deficit in Royal Air Force personnel strength to increase from 350 to 2,720 over the six months to 1 October. [HL381]

As announced in another place on 21 July 2004, (Official Report, col. 348) the trained strength of the Royal Air Force is being reduced to meet the 41,000 target by April 2008. This is being achieved through a balance of normal outflow, intake reductions and targeted redundancy. As a planned consequence of the strategy and the pace of the redundancy programme, the trained strength is falling faster than the reduction in requirement, which is resulting in a period of increased manning deficit. One significant contributing factor is that most of the 1,200 applicants selected for redundancy under tranche 2 left the service on 10 April 2006. Work is ongoing to reduce the requirement for manpower to minimise the deficit.